Click on the above link to visit Quartz Media’s site, for Kristi’s great piece about women, alcohol and our culture. This is from a U.S. perspective – and feels just as relevant here.

‘We can’t afford to live lives we have to fool our own central nervous systems into tolerating.’

How true.

Therapy – or yoga or mindfulness or self help or, or – that has an overt or implicit goal of functionality, of returning us to our lives more able to comply and conform, raises serious political and ethical questions. Even if that is why people come, in the first instance. As Jiddu Krishnamurti puts it:-

‘It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.’

Person-centred therapy supports an inward journey such as the one Kristi describes, from external locus and numbing, into organismic experiencing, aliveness and presence. In our culture that journey is akin to taking Morpheus’ red pill. It is unlikely to send us into the world content or compliant, and that applies however you identify in gender terms. No-one inhabits our current paradigm unscathed, even those who may appear to benefit in one way or another at a superficial level.

The shift to a more sustainable way of living that truly supports well-being is one we need to make on a collective level, as well as a personal one. At present – and understandably – many prefer the blue pill of forgetfulness, numbness, disconnection, be that through alcohol or another gate. Acknowledgement and gratitude to those who, like Kristi, are able to risk the red pill and speaking up, for they serve us all.

Here’s the Matrix scene, for those who have not seen it or who would like to see it again:-